11/01/2022
With business ramping back up at the winery, we want to formally introduce the NVWE team to you guys - starting with Don!
Hooray! 2022 marks Don Gillette’s 50th year in the wine trade, each one spent in California as a retail wine merchant.
Don was born in Los Angeles and began both his career and a northward migration in 1972, landing first in Santa Barbara. By the 1980s he had worked his way up to Sausalito and San Francisco.
Don joined the staff of Napa Valley Winery Exchange six months after its opening in 1987, where he spent the next thirty five years fully immersing himself in the ever expanding California wine universe.
To a large extent Don’s personal history parallels that of the modern history of the California wine industry, and he has a good memory. He is an avid and conscientious note taker, so the task of putting NVWE’s tasting panel decisions into writing ultimately became his responsibility. Don’s experience as a taster and evaluator of wine makes his contribution to the store panel a very important one, because the store sells almost exclusively wines that our staff has personally vetted. Beyond wine evaluation, his greatest attributes are customer service and wine sales. As hundreds of our long term customers will attest, Don’s sales skills are beyond the ordinary. He is focused and descriptive about what he has tasted and has never lost the energy and enthusiasm for fine wines. It’s rare that he sells a bottle without sharing some surprising bit of knowledge about its character or history, especially if that history is in someway exotic or profound. When Don tastes and describes new wines that evoke recollections of treasures he encountered in the past, he typically shares his memories of those legends, along with hopes and expectations for the new release. Above all, his greatest calling is for customer satisfaction, regardless of the price. We are all proud of his 35 years at NVWE.
Come meet Don and hear his expertise! 🥂